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Custody Issues
Divorce is painful — not only for husband and wife, but also for the children. It can be especially difficult to navigate custody arrangements. There is no easy way to divide time that was once shared as a family unit. Throw in the personal heartache that is weighing on each individual and custody can bring out the worst in all involved.
As you face different custody hardships, try to keep one thought at the forefront of your mind: What is best for my children? Children function best when they have a strong relationship with both parents. They have the best chance to heal when they have time with both a mother and father who love them. All the other issues (revenge, fear, control) that may tempt you to sabotage the relationship with the other parent should be set aside in the best interests of the children.
Many of you know this. As a single parent for 12 years, I knew the truth of what my daughter needed, but it was much harder to live it out. Read on. You'll find the practical tools, encouragement and help you need.
from Focus on the Family


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Noticed on your armory that you have the Triptych shield...I got the 33 badge healer shield already when that dropped last week. I ended up deciding not to swap and the shammy got it for his healing set.
Wouldn't mind you thoughts on the relative strengths of the two...I am trying to stack MP5 at the moment, so it was a bit of a wrench letting the 8 MP5 go.
[Triptych Shield of the Ancients]
[Light-Bearer's Faith Shield]
Triptych is probably slightly better than the Badge shield. You lose about 13 +healing in exchange for 8 mp5 and a touch more sta, int, and armor.
That being said, they're very similar, and it's arguably better for your raid for you to keep your shield and let the shammy have this shield. That way your raid has two epic healing shields rather than just one. I'm a fan of spreading the wealth and trying to minimize the amount of loot sharded or disenchanted.
Now, if the Triptych was going to be disenchanted, then grab it, but I'd let other people take it (even for offset) first.
Realistically, the next major shield upgrade is [Aegis of the Vindicator] off Magtheridon.

subset: commoncrawl


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Deep Fried Potato Skins
Use our BakeBot Ai Chat for instant answers.
Why I Love This Recipe
Ingredients You'll Need
4 large baking potatoes
2 cups (16 ounces) sour cream
1 envelope onion soup mix
1 tablespoon finely chopped onion
5 garlic cloves, minced
Dash hot pepper sauce
Oil for deep-fat frying
1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese
1/2 cup shredded Swiss cheese
6 to 8 bacon strips, cooked and crumbled
4 teaspoons minced chives or green onion
Bake potatoes at 400° for 1 hour or until tender.
Meanwhile, for dip, combine the sour cream, soup mix, onion, garlic and hot pepper sauce in a bowl.
Cover and refrigerate until serving.
When potatoes are cool enough to handle, cut in half lengthwise.
Scoop out pulp, leaving a 1/4-in. shell (save pulp for another use).
With a scissors, cut each potato half into three lengthwise strips.
In an electric skillet or deep-fat fryer, heat oil to 375°.
Fry skins in oil for 2-3 minutes or until golden brown and crisp.
Place potato skins in a 15-in. x 10-in. x 1-in. baking pan.
Combine the cheeses and bacon; sprinkle over potatoes.
Broil 4 in. from the heat for 1-2 minutes or until cheese is melted.
Sprinkle with chives.
Serve with the dip.


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Orson Welles in Italy by Alberto Anile
BY THE SUMMER OF 1948, Orson Welles had been living and working in Italy for nine months, and during that time, he'd been savaged by several of the country's gossip columnists and film journalists. He was uncouth, they said, and overrated. But at the beginning of September, as Welles prepared to show his new film, Macbeth, at the ninth Venice Film Festival, the 33-year-old director of Citizen Kane thought he might catch a break. As Alberto Anile puts it in his new book, Orson Welles in Italy, "He was chipper, confident that Macbeth would be given a proper reception." Sooner or later, Welles believed, the Italian film press would reward him with the kind of reviews he deserved.
He was wrong. "It is Welles, the presumptuous director, showing off the histrionics of Welles, the actor," one critic wrote after the Venice screening. Another proclaimed Macbeth "(a)n overblown attempt to astound and confound" — a film of such poor quality that "Shakespeare's bones are turning in their grave." A third, who had evidently hoped to nap during the movie, called it "the film that murders sleep." A fourth Italian critic, meanwhile, assailed Welles's Macbeth for the most idiosyncratic of reasons: "His characters all eat chicken with their fingers — not out of bad manners but an excess of temperament, imagination, and willpower. Exactly the sort of characters that bore us to death." Anile concludes:"Far from home, instead of finding refuge from Hollywood, Welles had found in Italy another country that didn't understand him."
In Orson Welles in Italy, Anile focuses on a five-and-a-half-year stretch beginning in 1947 and ending in 1953, one of the most frustrating periods in Welles's inimitable, if famously uneven, career. Welles's extended stay in the country was colored by professional miscalculations, financial worries, legal entanglements, and amusing language gaffes. According to Anile, when Welles fell for a local actress, he declared his desire to marry her, but in his imperfect Italian, what he actually said was, "I'm going to register her." Amidst it all, he suffered a drubbing from Italian journalists and film critics, the sustained nature of which forms the through-line of Anile's rich and fascinating book. "[E]gocentric, histrionic, proud as Mephistopheles," is how one critic described Welles in a Milanese newspaper in 1948 — and he was a fan.
Anile, the author of books about Italian film icons Roberto Rossellini and the actor Toto, says he aims to fill a conspicuous gap: "In all of Welles' career, the period from autumn 1947 to the spring of 1953 is the one that has been investigated least. Most biographies skip through the period — making only a few references to the films in which he acted, details of the one film (Othello) he made (as a director), and a few anecdotes." This is partly true, if a bit misleading. A number of books — among them Barbara Leaming's 1985 biography Orson Welles; This is Orson Welles, the 1992 compilation of discussions between Welles and the director Peter Bogdanovich; and Orson Welles, Joseph McBride's 1996 bio (an expanded edition of a title first published in 1972) — have dealt with Welles's years in Italy, although none are as singularly focused as Anile's. A more recent book, the entertaining yet slight My Lunches with Orson: Conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles, edited by Peter Biskind and published in July of this year, touches only briefly on the period.
Anile has obviously spent hundreds of hours sifting through old newspaper and magazine clips, which provide him with some of his most colorful material. Orson Welles in Italy also benefits from its inspired structure. The book tells a linear story, but every few chapters, Anile jumps in to present one of the extraordinary interviews he's recently conducted with venerable journalists and film industry professionals who witnessed Welles's time in Italy 60 years ago. In one interview, the actress and writer Franca Faldini says that Welles's experience wasn't unique: "Any American actor who stayed for any length of time in Italy soon got treated badly. We Italians are like that." In another, Gian Luigi Rondi, a critic who first panned Welles's films in the 1940s, says the filmmaker earned his bad reviews. "I should warn you," he tells Anile, "I haven't changed my mind and am not about to now." There are five of these Q&A sessions scattered throughout the book, and they offer invaluable measures of nuance and perspective.
On the other hand, Anile occasionally overdramatizes the proceedings. For instance, the first chapter opens with Welles's flight from France to Italy in the fall of 1947. It was an eventful trip, and after a lengthy detour that used up lots of fuel, Anile writes, the filmmaker, who had evidently been reading the entire time, "closed his book and for the first time looked at the pilot, perplexed. His glance was met by a still-expressionless face." These are details that Anile couldn't possibly know — the book includes scores of endnotes, but none for this anecdote — and they're more suited to a novel than a work of nonfiction. Similarly, late in the book Anile writes about the "quarantine" Welles was subjected to after a bite from a rabid dog, and how the downtime left him "unable to travel or shoot." But did the incident — the bite itself — actually occur? Anile's sourcing is too thin to say for sure. But these are relatively minor lapses in a generally well-documented book.
Ostensibly, Welles went to Italy for a role in Black Magic, director Gregory Ratoff's film version of a novel by Alexandre Dumas, which would be released in 1949. But as Anile reminds us, the young American star had plenty of reasons to look for work abroad. From a filmmaking standpoint, the previous few years had been choppy: The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), his second movie as a director, was edited without his approval, and in the half-decade that followed, Welles would battle with stateside studio executives over production budgets, casting decisions and assorted creative-control issues. An enemy of William Randolph Hearst ever since his fictionalized telling of the press baron's life story in Citizen Kane (1941), Welles had found another potent antagonist in J. Edgar Hoover; the FBI director's men were keeping an eye on the politically left-of-center director. What's more, he had huge debts — Anile says that one point, Welles owed more than $300,000 in taxes — and his marriage to Rita Hayworth was failing. He had nothing to lose by giving it a go in Italy.
To Welles, postwar Italy must have resembled a clean slate — "mainly," Anile writes, "because he was practically unheard of … Citizen Kane had not been released in Italy; very few had managed to catch it in France, and among those who hadn't it had an ambiguous reputation. And only the most attentive critics could have seen The Magnificent Ambersons and The Stranger," Welles's 1946 noir thriller. But there would be no grace period. In November 1947 Welles announced his presence with a press conference in Rome. He intended to talk about all the film work he had planned. Reporters, however, were more interested in the state of his relationship with the glamorous Hayworth. Welles wore a gray suit jacket and a pair of cufflinks. His clothes, one scribe told her readers, were adequate "for an American, perhaps, but shabby for an Italian."
Welles spent late 1947 and early 1948 working on Black Magic. The production was troubled. A stand-in was injured in an accident, the cinematographer had a fatal heart attack, and rumors of Welles's incompetence began to fly. According to one yarn, the filmmakers, who were granted permission to shoot inside the Quirinale Palace — a building with long ties to the Italian government and the Catholic Church, and the future home of the country's new president — had torn a door from its hinges. "The story of the broken door did the rounds," Anile writes, "changing a little each time. Some said that Welles had kicked the door down in a fit of rage and the shocking idea began to circulate that the Americans were reducing one of Italy's most prestigious historical buildings to a circus." The anecdote was almost certainly untrue, but it nonetheless helped shape the notion, growing within certain segments of the Italian movie press, that Welles was a vulgarian.
If Welles was worried about feeding into such a perception, he wasn't about to reinvent himself as a wallflower. He was soon to be single again. Married since 1943, he and Hayworth divorced in 1948 and he kept a busy social calendar, which provided reporters and gossip columnists with plenty of material. He was seen squiring various women about town, and he was parodied as an overweight, narcissistic blowhard. One article said that after a few months in the country, Welles was already wearing out his welcome: "We would ask one thing of the artist: a little discretion. In the end his rolling eyes and booming laugh lose interest." Welles, another publication reported, was "corpulent, with ruffled hair. His expression is somehow amazed, candid, and simple at the same time: the eyes of a child hypnotist. He laughs loudly, baring his teeth and gums. He wears a baggy sports jacket that might double up as a pajama top at home." Yet another piece described him as a nonstop drinker trying to erase from his memory a run of romantic and professional failures. This last article prompted a lawsuit from Welles; the publication eventually closed, and the suit was dropped three years later.
With his personal life a source of mockery, Welles managed to find inspiration in his burgeoning relationship with the producer of Black Magic, Michele Scalera. For several years, Scalera had wanted to make a film version of Othello, and he shared his vision with Welles. Though Scalera suggested that he "act in the film, nothing more," Anile writes, Welles soon hatched a bigger plan, one that would take him years to complete.
With Welles preparing to make what he thought would his next great film, his first movie, Citizen Kane finally opened in Italy in the spring of 1948. Kane, Anile explains, had been "held up first by the Fascist policy of homegrown talent and then by the war and is aftermath," and its arrival coincided with the rise of neorealism, a school of filmmaking that prized naturalistic performances and working-class stories. The stylized Kane, with its exotic camera angles, inventive lighting schemes and bold performances, offered audiences an altogether different kind of experience. The film won praise from some ardent fans. "Finally," wrote a critic in Milan, "we have a masterpiece." But in other quarters, Kane received a "lukewarm" reception. Anile writes. To look back on the Italian reviews from 1948 is to be struck by "the absurd distance between the opinions of the critics of the day and the unanimous praise, if not veneration, for the film today," he adds.
It's easy, 60 years later, to second-guess critics. But it's clear that Welles wasn't getting an entirely fair shake. For instance, Anile tells us that one particularly negative review was written by a critic who, under a pseudonym, had published the article that resulted in Welles's lawsuit. Meanwhile, some of the criticism, Anile says, was politically motivated: "Marxist critics," several of whom remained influential in postwar Italy, "could not get past the film's formalism — and, thus, its presumed indifference to social issues."
Within a few months, a round of critical takedowns would greet Macbeth at the 1948 Venice Film Festival. But Welles didn't sulk, at least not publicly. In the fall of 1948, he signed on to play a key role in Carol Reed's The Third Man, and he began production, initially in Venice and later in Morocco, of Othello. The projects would provide Welles with two very different filmmaking experiences. The Third Man, Welles recalls in My Lunches with Orson, required him to spend just a handful of days on the film's Vienna and London sets. The production, from Welles's perspective, was efficient, and it resulted in one of his most memorable performances. (The Third Man, made outside of Italy, gets little attention in Anile's book.) Othello, however, was a tortured process from the start.
Welles had recently fallen for a would-be Italian starlet named Lea Padovani, and she was set to play Desdemona to Welles's Othello. But when the romance failed near the end of 1948, the production fell into disarray. Welles, Anile writes, was forced to scrap "most of the film he had shot in Venice (thought to be, according to the Venetian press, 3,000 meters, or an hour and 50 minutes)." His search for a new Desdemona wasn't easy. Suzanne Cloutier, who finally got the part, "was the fourth actress hired by Welles to play Desdemona," Anile writes, "although the press book of the restored film of 1992 … claims she was the eleventh." Money, meanwhile, was a constant concern; on several occasions, a dwindling budget stopped the production cold. Several cinematographers came and went. And then there was plain bad luck. "When some seagulls got into one shot," Anile says, "Welles was forced to try to include them later as well; he tried to bellow them down from the skies, then sprinkled ten kilos of sardines over the ground."
Othello, finally finished after a lengthy stop-and-go shoot, was due to debut at the 1951 Venice Film Festival. But when it was removed from the slate, apparently because of audio problems, Italian journalists renewed their hammering of Welles. Their main objection was based on the fact that Welles had shown Macbeth in Venice three years earlier but, apparently stung by bad reviews, had pulled it from the roster of movies up for awards from the festival's jury. Now he was at it again. "Could Orson Welles come to the festival without creating some sort of ruckus?" wondered one journalist. "Of course not." Though Welles took questions from reporters, and tried to explain why the film wasn't ready, Anile says that the relationship between the Italian press and the American filmmaker was completely severed: "When Othello was withdrawn from the Venice Film Festival, the possibility that Welles and Italy might be reconciled faded away to nothing … Four years' worth of gossip and criticism had dug a deep hole for Welles that no press conference could fill."
What Anile fails to emphasize, however, is the degree to which Welles's magnificently bad timing played a role in his relationship with Italy. He arrived after the war, and to some Italians the big, loud American must have looked like a man who'd embarked on an unseemly victory lap, the very embodiment of empire. Anile suggests as much, but it's a point, more forcefully argued, that would've improved his book. Gossip and critical hostility poisoned his stay in Italy, but the bad press makes a lot more sense given its historical context.
By 1952, Welles seemed to have been as tired of the Italian movie industry as it was of him. That year, he agreed to appear in a film titled L'uomo, la bestia e la virtù, but the following year he left the production before it was done, and the movie, Anile says, received bad reviews. In terms of his behind-the-camera work, "between the end of 1951 and the beginning of 1953 Welles thought up six films, and appears to have written a script for each one. But he didn't shoot a single foot of film," Anile writes.
No single event chased Welles out of Italy, Anile tells us, "but generally," by the spring of 1953, "he preferred Spain and France." Even so, he would return to the country on and off throughout his life. He shot part of Don Quixote, a film he never finished, in Rome in 1960, and the following year Welles worked on the screenplay for The Trial (1962) in Fregene, at the family home of the Italian actress Paola Mori, whom he married in 1955. He spent several days in Venice in 1974 making a documentary about Othello, and as late as 1984 he was hoping to return to Italy to do some more filming.
Absorbing as it is, Anile's book isn't one that will redefine the way we understand Welles. At the end of the final chapter, he remains the filmmaker who, in Citizen Kane, made what some say is the greatest movie ever, only to spend the next half-century being told that he would never recapture the creative vigor of his mid-20s. But if we judge a book based solely on whether or not it upends everything we thought we knew about its subject, we're bound to be disappointed. On its own terms, Orson Welles in Italy gives us a more detailed impression of a great artist in the midst of a gruesome spell, and it entertains in the process. As the years passed, Anile writes, Welles would be reassessed by new generations of Italian critics, who offered praise of a kind that he never received in the late 1940s and early 1950s. But My Lunches with Orson makes clear that Welles never forgot his experience in the country. "[T]he Italians," he tells Jaglom shortly before his death in 1985, "always despised me."
LARB Contributor
Kevin Canfield is a writer in New York. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, Film Comment and other publications.
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On March 1, across-the-board spending cuts, known here in Washington as "the sequester," took effect when Congress was unable to reach a new agreement on the budget. These cuts are required by law for every item within USDA's budget, and they will impact all of the work we do in some way.
Under the Obama Administration, USDA already has made historic efforts to streamline operations and safeguard taxpayer dollars. Under our Blueprint for Stronger Service, we have carried out workforce reductions, closed offices and laboratories, and streamlined IT services. We have cut our travel costs by more than 42 percent since 2010. We're always looking for new ways to save more.
These targeted efforts have already saved taxpayers more than $700 million. In fact, our operating budget today is lower than it was in 2009.
At the same time, we have achieved record results – record farm loans, record conservation efforts, record assistance for rural businesses, and much more. This was made possible by a concerted effort at every level of USDA to find smart, targeted, common-sense efficiencies.
The across-the-board sequester cuts limit our ability to achieve additional common-sense budget reductions. For example, USDA will be forced to carry out furloughs of food inspectors – an action that will force plant shutdowns and put a new strain on livestock producers.
As USDA moves forward to implement the sequester as required by Congress, I am committed to carrying out these cuts in a manner that is fair, and one that provides the least possible disruption for USDA's customers. The indiscriminate nature of the sequester will make both of these goals difficult, but we take our work seriously. We are not going to let up in our efforts to strengthen the rural economy and build up new economic opportunity in rural America.
Rural America has momentum today, growing more food, more jobs, and more opportunity than ever before. The sequester threatens to deeply impact this progress. That's why I hope that Congress will take action soon to avert these harmful cuts, and let us at USDA get back to finding common-sense budget reductions that have already saved hundreds of millions of dollars.


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Tuesday, 26 April 2011 01:23 PM EDT
Amid all the free food and other goodies that come with a job at Google Inc., there's one benefit a lot of employees don't even know about: a cluster of high-tech workshops that have become a tinkerer's paradise.
Workers escape from their computer screens and office chairs to weld, drill and saw on expensive machinery they won't find at Home Depot.
Besides building contraptions with a clear business purpose, Google employees use the shops for fun: They create elaborate holiday decorations, build cabinets for their homes and sometimes dream big like the engineers working on a pedal-powered airplane with a 100-foot wingspan.
The "Google Workshops" are the handiwork of Larry Page, who co-founded Google with Sergey Brin in a rented garage. Page authorized the workshops' opening in 2007 to try to reconnect the company with its roots.
Google, which has kept the workshops under wraps until Tuesday, gave The Associated Press an exclusive tour shortly after Page reclaimed his original job as CEO on April 4.
The workshops offer a peek into ways Page may try to make the Internet giant work with the verve and creativity of a garage-bound entrepreneur. Page believes the 13-year-old company needs to return to thinking and acting like a feisty startup as it faces competition from younger Internet stars such as Facebook, Twitter and Groupon.
"There is a feeling here at Google that all good things start in a garage," said Greg Butterfield, an engineering lab manager who oversees the workshops. "Larry wanted to create the same kind of environment he and Sergey had when they started Google — a sort of a playground or sandbox for pursuing their ideas."
Originally known as the "Pi" Shop, the geeky getaway is open only to a privileged few among Google's 26,300 employees. To gain entry, workers must pass a test that includes such questions as "When you are using a band saw, what speed would you use to cut through aluminum?"
There are four separate rooms — for metal, wood, welding and electronics — tucked into an isolated corner of Google's 4.3-million-square-foot headquarters in Mountain View.
Besides heavy-duty equipment that includes an oscilloscope, plasma cutter and miter saw, there's also some children's toys. One piece of gadgetry currently under construction in the shops partially consists of Legos — the same material that Page once used to build an inkjet printer, years before creating Google.
The projects that have emerged from the workshops include a giant tricycle that was designed to haul around 250 pounds of high-tech photo equipment. The trikes are used to supply the company's online mapping service with pictures of streets and other areas inaccessible by cars.
Engineers also have used the shops to work on early prototypes of smartphones that run on Google's Android software as well as other products still under development that the company declined to discuss.
Most Google employees, though, use the shops for personal purposes. The ideas percolating in the workshops are so unpredictable that employees are encouraged to drop off scrap metal or other detritus just in case the junk might suit someone's project. During the AP's recent visit, a couple of old wheel axles and the rusted tailgate from a truck were sitting in the welding shop.
"You never know what you are going to find in here," Butterfield said.
Google isn't the only place in Silicon Valley where computer-coding engineers can show off their industrial might. A venture called TechShops sells memberships starting at about $100 per month to use heavy machinery for wood, metal, plastics and textiles. Besides the San Francisco Bay Area, TechShops also operates in Raleigh, N.C.
Google's workshops are free to all employees, like virtually all the company's perquisites. But the workshops are much more exclusive than Google's other benefits.
All employees must be certified to run the machinery before they are issued a badge to enter. The screening usually falls to Rodney Broome, 63, a veteran machinist who teaches the craft at nearby San Jose City College when he isn't busy as the foreman of Google's workshops.
"I feel like I am running my own company within the company here," Broome said.
Just as they do when they are trying to get hired at Google, employees have to pass a test. About 300 Google workers have been certified so far. Most of them are engineers, although badges have been given to a few who work in ad sales.
Broome said there have been no injuries in the workshops so far.
The screening standards are so strict that a college degree in mechanical engineering wasn't enough for Google software engineer Ihab Awad.
He attended a local high school's wood shop class for a semester before earning Broome's clearance. Awad also won Broome's approval to use the welding equipment.
His biggest accomplishment so far: a rocket-shaped bar equipped with a keg to pour beer at the end of long days in the office.
"The workshops are my No. 1 perk at Google," Awad said during a break from a welding project. "They're the main reason I will be a Googler for life."
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Nikita Review: Is the Quest for a Normal Life Futile?
Carla Day at .After spending all of Nikita season 3 wondering what Amanda wanted from Nikita, the answer was finally revealed in "Invisible Hand."
This whole time Amanda's been looking for validation of her belief that Nikita is the "perfect killing machine" and her "most perfect creation." That's what she's told herself anyway. I'm not entirely convinced Amanda knows or understands her own end game despite her nearly perfect record in manipulating people and circumstances to achieve her end game.
So much has happened that she didn't expect or plan that it's somewhat of a miracle that her manipulations ended up where she wanted. And, when exactly did she come up with this end game? After Ari's death most likely. She teamed up with the Shop at some point and then decided to use Michael's desire for a new hand as the cornerstone of her plan. She implanted the new style kill chip into his blood stream. Once that was done, it was all a matter of how to get a face-to-face with Nikita.
With Division decimated, Amanda left bread crumbs to lead Nikita to her. It's still unclear whether Amanda actually did anything to Nikita the last time they were together, but if she's telling the truth she didn't. All she needed was the idea that she might have to keep Nikita on her trail. After everything Nikita has been through because of Amanda, it's no wonder that she can't just let it go.
Division may be gone and they may have been given their freedom, but Nikita was correct when she told Michael that it wouldn't be over until Amanda was finally out of the picture. Though, given where Nikita is now, even if she would have run, Amanda had the deadly upper hand after contaminating Michael.
The fake-out with Hasan, the humanitarian, was probably unnecessary, but it opened a new career path for Alex. She would be a great Special Envoy to the UN. It would allow her to travel the world helping those in need. It may not be as action-packed, but it would keep her busy. Sonya's words of encouragement were a pleasant surprise. The two of them were never close, but I could see them becoming good friends in the outside world.
With her friends looking to move on from Division, Nikita is probably in a position to carry out Amanda's demand without much interference from the others. But, will Nikita kill the President to save Michael? Nikita will look for a way out of this conundrum, but Amanda is smart enough to expect that as well.
I was surprised that Nikita didn't just write a note while she was talking to Michael. Amanda may have ears on Nikita and even electronic access to the computers, but good old fashion pencil and paper are nearly impossible to track. She can't use cameras since Division's are inoperable. Perhaps, Nikita will communicate and get assistance with her problem in the finale.
Despite Amanda's blackmail, Nikita will certainly go out on her own terms. She wanted Michael to know she loves him and told him she was ready to get married. Given the finale title, "'Til Death Do Us Part," I hope they do get married just in case Amanda succeeds in either killing Michael or getting Nikita killed. Though, ultimately, either death would most likely leave her empty. Once someone is dead, they can no longer be played.
How will Nikita get out of this? Will she let Michael or someone else in on what's going on and get help? What do you want to see out of the finale? Should Amanda be killed off?
At least, it won't be the last we see of the show. Nikita's been renewed for a shortened season 4 to return in the fall.
Odds and Ends
- Nice satellite-driven car action! Even better was Nikita's quick thinking escape through a shot out sunroof.
- The callback to the airplane full of kids was the type of connection that Nikita does well. Everything within this world is interconnected.
- Birkhoff and Sonya's relationship has moved along well. I love that he was concerned about moving out into the real world and she was reassuring. Her "shut up" after kissing him was awesome.
- Ryan is getting the President to sign an immunity agreement for them all. Could that play into what Nikita decides to do? Depending on the deal, she could get away with it ... maybe?
- The technology used on the show borders on unbelievable, but the writers always end up explaining it such that it appears plausible. A kill chip in the blood? Okay, sure, why not?
- As much as I like Amanda, I think it's time for her to meet her end. I go back and forth on whether I want Nikita to take her out or not. In the end, perhaps the best death for Amanda would be a simple and unexpected one, like the Shop just putting a bullet in her head for failing them.
Carla Day is a staff writer for TV Fanatic. Follow her on Twitter and on Google+.


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The American Psychological Association's newly released report on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation evaluated peer-reviewed studies of sexual orientation change efforts that were conducted between 1960 and 2007. The report criticized these studies' measurements of efficacy and safety as methodologically unsound.
Among the studies found to be unreliable was a 2007 study by evangelicals Mark Yarhouse and Stanton Jones. Their work was funded by Exodus and it utilized activist research subjects who were recruited with help from Exodus and the ex-gay therapy lobby NARTH. Critics said the study suffered from the following shortcomings:
- The study was conducted by two supporters of ex-gay ministries.
- Jones and Yarhouse originally sought 300 participants, but after more than a year of seeking to round up volunteers, they had to settle on only 98 participants.
- During the course of the study, 25 dropped out, and one participant's answers were too incomplete to be used.
- Of the remaining 72 only 11 reported "satisfactory, if not uncomplicated, heterosexual adjustment." (direct quote). Some of these 11 remained primarily homosexual in attraction or, at best, bisexual, but were satisfied that they were just slightly more attracted to the opposite sex, or slightly less attracted to the same sex.
- After the study ended, but before the book was finished, one of the 11 wrote to the authors to say that he lied — he really wanted to change, had really hoped he had changed, and answered that he had changed. But he concluded that he hadn't, came out, and is now living as an openly gay man.
- Dozens of participants experienced no lessening of same-sex attraction and no increase in opposite-sex attraction, but were classified as "success" stories by Jones and Yarhouse simply because they maintained celibacy — something many conservative gay people already do.
- The study purposely declined to interview any ex-gay survivors: people who claim to have been injured by ex-gay programs and who have formed support groups such as Beyond Ex-Gay. Despite — or because of — this omission, the authors of this study make the unfounded claim that there is little or no evidence of harm resulting from unproven, unsupervised, unlicensed, and amateur ex-gay counseling tactics.
In short, the study design was so flawed that no mainstream, peer-reviewed, mental-health journal would publish it. And the study's supposed success stories were gay celibate individuals who adopted false labels to direct attention away from frequently undiminished same-sex attraction.
While it acknowledged their sincere observations about clients' conservative religious values, this week's APA report criticized Jones & Yarhouse on page 90:
A published study that appeared in the grey literature in 2007 (Jones & Yarhouse, 2007) has been described by SOCE advocates and its authors as having successfully addressed many of the methodological problems that affect other recent studies, specifically the lack of prospective research. The study is a convenience sample of self-referred populations from religious self-help groups. The authors claim to have found a positive effect for some study respondents in different goals such as decreasing same-sex sexual attractions, increasing other-sex attractions, and maintaining celibacy. However, upon close examination, the methodological problems described in Chapter 3 (our critique of recent studies) are characteristic of this work, most notably the absence of a control or comparison group and the threats to internal, external, construct, and statistical validity. Best-practice analytical techniques were not performed in the study, and there are significant deficiencies in the analysis of longitudinal data, use of statistical measures, and choice of assessment measures. The authors' claim of finding change in sexual orientation is unpersuasive due to their study' methodological problems.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Yarhouse, of Pat Robertson's Regent University, praised the APA report for urging a "creative approach to gay clients' religious beliefs but 'Äî like [Exodus president Alan] Chambers 'Äî disagreed with its skepticism about changing sexual orientation." The Times continued:
Yarhouse and a colleague, Professor Stanton Jones of Wheaton College, will be releasing findings at the APA meeting Friday from their six-year study of people who went through Exodus programs. More than half of 61 subjects either converted to heterosexuality or "disidentified" with homosexuality while embracing chastity, their study said.
To Jones and Yarhouse, their findings prove change is possible for some people, and on average the attempt to change will not be harmful.
Given that the APA has already criticized their research methods, it will be interesting to see whether re-release of flawed data — with some updates and changes — successfully shifts media coverage of the APA report.


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In an Ab-enriched category, it is natural to produce an image factorization of a morphism by first forming its kernel and then the cokernel of the kernel. Similarly, in a regular category we can produce an image factorization by first forming the kernel pair and then the coequalizer of the kernel pair. Several similar situations arise in the study of 2-categories as well. The theory of generalized kernels in enriched categories subsumes all of these examples.
Let be a cosmos and let denote the interval category regarded as a -category, i.e. it has two objects and , with (the unit object of ) and (the initial object of ). Let be a -category which contains as a full subcategory, and let be the full subcategory of containing all the objects except . Then the inclusions of and into induce a profunctor . This is the input data for a notion of kernels.
Now suppose that is a -category with sufficiently many limits and colimits, and that is a morphism in . Then can be identified with a -functor . The kernel of is defined to be the -weighted limit of , which is a -functor . By construction of , it can equivalently be described as the (enriched, pointwise) right Kan extension of from into , followed by restriction to . Since the inclusion of into is fully faithful, it follows that .
Similarly, let be a -functor ; we call such a functor kernel data. The quotient of defined to be its -weighted colimit. This is a functor , i.e. a single morphism in . Again, by construction of , the quotient of can equivalently be described by the left Kan extension of to , followed by restriction to , and since is fully faithful, the source of the quotient of is the object .
Since colimits and limits weighted by a fixed profunctor are adjoint to each other (or equivalently, since left and right Kan extension are left and right adjoint to restriction), we obtain an adjunction
Moreover, by the remarks above, for any object this adjunction restricts to an adjunction
where denotes the subcategory of on those functors such that . Of course the analogous subcategory is just the coslice category .
Of particular interest is the counit of this adjunction at a morphism , which is a morphism in . In other words, it is a factorization of . Often the factorizations produced in this way are familiar.
With , let be the category
with the two composites being equal. That is, is the "walking fork." Then kernel data is a pair of parallel arrows, the kernel of a morphism is its kernel pair, and the quotient of a parallel pair is their coequalizer. In a regular category, the factorization produced in this way is the usual image factorization.
Note that since coequalizers are epic, the full image of is a preorder, and thus in this case the adjunction is idempotent. This yields the familiar fact that a morphism is a coequalizer iff it is the coequalizer of its kernel pair, and a parallel pair is a kernel pair iff it is the kernel pair of its coequalizer.
Again with , let be the category
Then kernel data is just a pair of objects, the kernel of a morphism is the pair , and the quotient of a pair is the coproduct injection . The factorization of obtained in this way is .
With , let be the Ab-enriched category with three objects and and all other hom-groups being . Then a diagram of shape in an Ab-category consists of a pair of composable arrows whose composite is zero. Then kernel data is also just a single morphism, the kernel of a morphism is its kernel in the usual sense, and the quotient of a morphism (considered as kernel data) is its cokernel in the usual sense. The resulting factorization is again the usual image factorization, and the adjunction is again idempotent.
With , let be the (strict) 2-category with three objects and , , and the "walking parallel pair" . Then kernel data in a 2-category consists of a pair of parallel 2-cells, and the quotient of such a pair is their coequifier. In at least, the kernel of a functor is the category of parallel pairs in which become equal in , and the resulting factorization of consists of an bijective-on-objects-and-full functor followed by a faithful one. Since bijective-on-objects-and-full functors are epic in , the adjunction is again idempotent.
Again with , let be the 2-category with three objects and , the discrete category with two objects, and . Then kernel data is a pair of parallel 1-morphisms, and the quotient of such a pair is their coinserter. The kernel of a morphism is the comma object .
Once again with , let be the 2-category
Then kernel data is again a single arrow, its quotient is its pseudocolimit, and the kernel of a morphism is its pseudolimit. The resulting factorization is one of the ones arising in the canonical model structure on any 2-category.
Continuing with , let be the 2-category on with , , and the walking isomorphism. Then kernel data is a 2-cell, and its quotient is its coinverter. The kernel of a morphism is sometimes called its invertee?. Since coinverters are epic, the adjunction is idempotent: thus a morphism is a coinverter iff it is the coinverter of its invertee, and a 2-cell is an invertee iff it is the invertee of its coinverter.
Finally with , let be the 3-truncated augmented simplex category with additional 2-cells added, in such a way that kernel data is codescent data and the quotient of such data is a codescent object. Then the factorization produced in consists of a bijective-on-objects functor followed by a fully faithful one.
In some of the above examples, the resulting factorization of a morphism is not what one would hope for. In particular, it need not give a factorization system of any kind. However, the adjunction does induce a comonad on such that . This is the "left half" of the factorization obtained in this way; the "right half" is merely a pointed endofunctor such that . The algebras for are usually what one would hope for as the "right class" of the (weak) factorization systems intuitively associated to the above examples.
Now this data is exactly the required input for the construction of a free algebraic weak factorization system. If is sufficiently well-behaved (such as locally presentable), then this free nwfs exists, and gives the factorizations we would hope for in most cases. It is constructed by (possibly transfinite) iteration, i.e. we take the quotient of the kernel, then take the quotient of the kernel of the right half of the resulting factorization, and so on. The resulting monad is usually algebraically-free on , and thus the -algebras are again just what we would expect.
For example, in the coinverter-invertee example above, the right clas of the factorization system produced in this way consists of conservative functors.
This sort of idea has been thought of by various people at various times. The above version, especially the view of factorization systems, is a slight modification of one presented by Richard Garner to the Sydney category seminar in February 2010. Other references include
Betti, Schumacher, and Street, "Factorizations in bicategories" (unpublished)
Betti, "Adjointness in descent theory", JPAA
Mathieu Dupont, Abelian categories in dimension 2, arXiv:0809.1760, section 1.2.2
Last revised on March 17, 2021 at 17:19:09. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.


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Entry updated 13 September 2021. Tagged: International.
Sf in the modern sense evolved tentatively in Hungary in the 1870s, although it had had forerunners. The end of the eighteenth century was characterized by the popularity of Fantastic Voyages and Utopias. French and other sources inspired Tariménes utazása ["The Voyage of Tariménes"] (1804) by György Bessenyei (1747-1811). The hero, who gets to an unknown country, not only describes the perfect order of the state but also presents a copy of its constitution. Another important fantastic utopia was Utazás a Holdba ["Voyage to the Moon"] (1836) by Ferenc Ney (1814-1899), a novel in which travellers find that the Moon has everything they miss on Earth: the possibility of happiness and the happiness of equality. János Munkácsy (1802-1841), in his Hogy áll a világ a jövö században? ["How Stands the World in the Next Century?"] (1838), describes the wonderful future development of Transportation and many social changes: deadly Weapons are put aside and conflicts between states are settled by competitive poetry recitals. The first Hungarian Space Opera was Végnapok ["The Final Days"] (1847) by Miklós Jósika (1794-1865). This apocalyptic novel had an immense success. The story takes place on Earth in a Far-Future ice age.
Mór Jókai is justly regarded as the greatest author produced by Hungary. He was very prolific – his collected works run to several hundred volumes. His most important works of fantasy and sf are Óceánia about a romantic Atlantis, Fekete gyémántok (1870; trans A Gerard as Black Diamonds 1896), set in a North Polar sea, Egész az északi polusig ["All the Way to the North Pole"] (1876), in which ancient patriarchs and fairy-like ladies are revived from frozen hibernation to facilitate the author's criticism of contemporary society, and Ahol a pénz nem Isten ["Where Money is not a God"] (1904), describing the life of a happy island community, and hinting at the possibility of the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Along with these sometimes Edgar Allan Poe-like fantasies comes Jókai's most significant sf novel, A jövö század regénye ["The Novel of the Next Century"] (1872), whose story is founded in the invention of a marvellous new material, "ichor". Aeroplanes made of ichor serve the heroes, who dominate global Communications and trade (see Pax Aeronautica); declaring War on anarchistic Russia, they fight the last war of mankind and create eternal peace. The novel then moves onto the cosmic scale: a Comet menaces Earth but is fought off by mankind, the Moon is colonized and the Solar System is conquered.
Jókai's disciple Titusz Tóvölgyi (1838-1918) wrote a surprisingly interesting novel about the future socialist state: Az új világ ["The New World"] (1888). Elsewhere, besides sociopolitical novels there were fantasies of markedly scientific foundation, like Repülögépen a Holdba ["On an Airplane to the Moon"] (1899) by István Makay (1870-1935), another Jókai disciple, which, antedating H G Wells, describes a society of cave-dwelling Selenites. Barna Arthur ["Arthur Barna"] (1880) by Gusztáv Beksics (1847-1906) has an African volcano spreading flowing gold over the country, with the consequent bankruptcy of trusts, banks and states.
In the first half of the twentieth century the authors gathering around the journal Nyugat ["West"] were attracted almost without exception to the fantastic, and with them sf reached artistic heights once more; they include Dezsö Kosztolányi (1885-1935), Géza Csáth (1888-1919), a sample of whose output was assembled as The Magician's Garden and Other Stories (trans Jascha Kessler and Charlotte Rogers 1980), Géza Laczkó (1884-1953), Gyula Szini (1876-1932), László Cholnoky (1879-1929), Béla Balázs (1884-1949) and Margit Kaffka (1880-1918). Unfortunately, only two names are known in the English-speaking world: Frigyes Karinthy and Mihály Babits.
Karinthy wrote a good many stories about Time Travel, Disaster, Psi Powers and so on, but these are surpassed by his philosophical novels. Utazás Faremidóba (1916) and Capillária (1921), which have been assembled as Voyage to Faremido/Capillaria (omni trans Paul Tabori 1965 Hungary; 1966), are sardonic sequels to Jonathan Swift's stories of Gulliver and his travels. The former deals with problems of AI and the latter describes the conflict between men and women in an Under-the-Sea empire. Mennyei riport ["A Report from the Heavens"] (1937), the surprising story of a journey to the next world, is an important precursor of modern sf.
The novels of the poet Mihály Babits stand out for their literary merit and for the interest of their ideas. In Gólyakalifa ["Storks' Caliph"] (1916; trans as King's Stork 1948 Hungary; retrans anon as The Nightmare 1966), his first novel, he created a world of pure fantasy; the protagonist is a young man living a surreal double life. Another novel, Elza pilóta, avagy a tökéletes társadalom ["The Pilot Elza, or The Perfect Society"] (1933), is a description of an episode in an age of eternal war, its protest against fascism being pointed at a time when fascism was spreading rapidly.
Utazás Kazohiniában ["A Voyage in Kazohinia"] (1941 censored; text restored 1946) by Sándor Szathmári is a bitter, Swiftian (and Karinthyan) Satire describing a new journey of Gulliver. Kazohinia is divided into two parts, one where exaggerated rationalism prevails, the other ruled by the uncontrolled power of the instincts.
In the Fall of 1945 László Gáspár (? - ) produced his short novel Mi, I. Adolf ["We, Adolf 1"] (1945), subtitled "If the Germans had Won". In this postwar nightmare, fascism rules by terror and weaponry, and all peoples are slaves of the Germans (see Hitler Wins).
The two decades after World War Two did not favour Hungarian sf – Soviet sf, along with the theoretical views it espoused, dominated the sf published in Hungary – and only one item from this period is memorable: Az ibolyaszínü fény ["The Violet Light"] (1956) by Péter Földes (1916-? ), a juvenile adventure that presents interesting ideas. In 1968, however, the publishing house Móra began a paperback sf series under the imprint Kozmosz Fantasztikus Könyvek. In 1972 Móra followed this with the magazine Galaktika, edited by Péter Kuczka, which started as a quarterly and is now a monthly, with a circulation of 50,000. Its younger stablemate (since 1985) is Robur, a bimonthly sf magazine for juvenile readers, with a circulation of 80,000-100,000. Other publishers now publish sf, though the Móra book series, also long under the editorship of Kuczka, remains the most significant.
Today 25-30 authors in Hungary are engaged in sf, although many of them work also in other genres. Among the older authors is Mária Szepes (1908-2007), who in Tükörajtó a tengerben ["Mirror Door in the Sea"] (1976), Surayana élö szobrai ["Living Statues of Surayana"] (1971) and Napszél ["Sunwind"] (1983) draws her figures of fantasy with great psychological force. She introduced ESP motifs to Hungarian sf, mainly through her first and most influential novel, A vörös oroszlán ["The Red Lion"] (1946), the story of an alchemist living through the centuries and from sin to redemption. Iván Boldizsár (1912-1988) belonged to the same generation; his Születésnap ["Birthday"] (1959) is a Time-Travel novel. The most famous book of István Elek (1915-1992) is a juvenile adventure, Mérenylet a világürben ["An Attempt in Space"] (1967). József Cserna (1899-1975) wrote a number of admonitory stories about nuclear World War Three, the destruction of the Ecology and other dangers menacing mankind.
Next comes the generation of writers born in the 1920s and 1930s, like Gyula Fekete (1922- ), an excellent novelist in the realistic tradition. His sf works are all utopian and educational, whether set on unknown islands or on distant planets. In A szerelmesek bolygója ["Planet of Lovers"] (1964) he deals satirically with juvenile morals and life-values; in Triszex ["Trisex"] (1974) he predicts changes in family life and in human relationships. His most famous work is A kék sziget ["The Blue Island"] (1976), a harmonious Utopia. Gyula Hernádi (1926- ) is a restless, experimenting author; he blends surrealism with real and fictitious documents. His significant novels are Az eröd ["The Fortress"] (1971), Az elnökasszony ["Madame President"] (1978) and Hasfelmetszö Jack ["Jack the Ripper"] (1982). Zoltán Csernai (1925- ) is one of the most popular sf writers. His main focus is on encounters between Aliens and humans in the past and present; this provides the background to his trilogy Titok a világ tetején ["Secret on the Top of the World"] (1961), Az özönvz balladája ["The Ballad of the Flood"] (1964) and Atlantisz ["Atlantis"] (1968). His Boldogságcsinálók ["Producers of Happiness"] (1974) is an interesting psychological novel. Among his several short stories, "Kövek" ["Stones"] (1974) is perhaps the best of all Hungarian sf short stories; it has been much translated. Péter Zsoldos (1930- ) is an sf author in the US-UK tradition, his recurrent subjects being Space Flight and Robots. His best novels are Feladat ["The Task"] (1971), Ellenpont ["Counterpoint"] (1973), Távoli tüz ["A Distant Fire"] (1969), A Viking visszatér ["Return of the Viking"] (1967) and A holtak nem vetnek árnyékot ["The Dead Cast No Shadows"] (1983). Ervin Gyertyán (1925- ) prefers a humorous, satirical attitude in Kibernerosz ["Cyberneros"] (1963) and Isten óvd az elnököt! ["God Save the President!"] (1971), paying special attention to the differences between Man and Machine, and also to the nature of identity. Two sf works by Miklós Rónaszegi (1930- ), A rovarok lázadása ["Revolt of the Insects"] (1969) and Ördögi liquor ["Liquor of the Devil"] (1972), were published as juveniles, although there is nothing juvenile about their themes: the first analyses the mechanisms of fascism and the second unveils ways in which modern society dehumanizes and manipulates.
Novels of adventure and scientific inspiration have been written also by Klára Fehér (1922- ), László Nemes (1920- ) and Tibor Dáné (1923- ). Dezsö Kemény (1925- ) melds sf with the crime story. Az utolsó ember ["The Last Man"] (1982) by Péter Bogáti (1924- ), a Robinsonade about the last survivor of world Holocaust (see Last Man), bears comparison with better-known treatments of the subject. László András (1919-1988), György Nemes (1910-1998), András Kürti (1922- ) and Rudolf Weinbrenner (1923-1987) are all writers who have enriched Hungarian sf with one or two books. A rather different coloration can be found in A Kozmosz tizenötödik törvénye ["The Fifteenth Law of the Cosmos"] (1984) by Mihály Gergely (1921- ), a novel in which alien visitors try to force humanity into peace and intelligent cooperation.
Perhaps the most important member of the younger generation is Péter Szentmihályi Szabó (1945- ). His collection of short stories A sebezhetetlen ["The Invulnerable"] (coll 1978) tries out every voice and technique of sf; A tökéletes változat ["The Perfect Variety"] (1983) is a Dystopia about contradictory social systems in the distant future. Two very prolific younger authors are László L Lörincz (1939- ) and István Nemere (1944- ). Lörincz's collection of short stories A nagy kupola szégyene ["The Shame of the Great Dome"] (coll 1982) deals with Crime and Punishment and with problems of social isolation. His novels, such as A hosszú szafari ["The Long Safari"] (1984) and A földalatti piramis ["The Underground Pyramid"] (1986), are much appreciated for their exciting plots, richness of ideas and beautiful style. Nemere's most successful novels (out of about 60) are A kozmosz korbácsa ["The Whip of the Cosmos"] (1982), Az acélcápa ["The Steel Shark"] (1982) and A neutron akció ["The Neutron Project"] (1982).
One Mainstream Writer who has occasionally turned to sf is Péter Lengyel, who wrote the prizewinning Ogg második bolygója ["Ogg's Second Planet"] (1969). [PK]
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MACS SUCK! PLEASE REMOVE THIS FORUM, PLEASE. Keep This Site Strictly Win And Linux Based. There Is No Room For Macs In This World.
Greetings: Mac security is relevant. We don't have any here, but a lot of organizations, including school districts, have hundreds of them on-site. Certainly we should provide a place for them to discuss any problems that arise.
MACS SUCK! PLEASE REMOVE THIS FORUM, PLEASE. Keep This Site Strictly Win And Linux Based. There Is No Room For Macs In This World. 'Macs suck'? Ever tried AutoCad and associates on a Mac? It'll blow your mind... 'Keep this site...'? So there's nothing but Win and Linux? You might not like the 'Pokemon' look of the newer Macs, but they definitely have something to add to this forum. OS X is coooollll by the way. BTW, about Pokemon... JP, what's with the avatars? You scanned all of your Pokemon cards? You've got quite a collection, I must say ;-) BTW II: the Great Smurf (or whatever you call him back there) - and the Smurfs in general - is a Belgian cartoon. And there's a copyright on it... lol
Sorry JP, but dont u think it's a little pathetic for me to have to start this forum off by saying, MACS SUCK! . I mean if someone accually cared about this forum it would have been started off already bu someone........ But i mean it's your site dude.
You'll get a new change! ONE new change! NOW make your point!
If you don't like discussing Mac security...if you don't like Macs, then don't look in this forum. It isn't that hard. No one is going to force you to talk about Mac stuff if you just view the Win and Linux forums. If no one uses it, no one uses it, but if someone wants to, why shouldn't they be able to? geesh...
\"If you torture the data enough, it will confess.\" --Ronald Coase
real mature...
macs are far superior to pcs. everyone with a pc should burn it and buy a g4.
Everyone I have talked to who owns a mac is in love with them. They tell me to rush out and get one ASAP. Problem is that my computer does everything I need and want it to do for now. Also why should I pay $2500+ for a top of the line mac when I could build a faster and more powerful PC for less.
Wine maketh merry: but money answereth all things. --Ecclesiastes 10:19
Macs don't suck, ppl who don't know anything bout Apple or it's background will tell you that. And yes it's true not everyone can afford one. BUT rumor has it that Apple is working on a i386 version of Mac OS just like Sun who recently released Solaris for intel architectures.
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text: Buckingham Elementary School recently announced its November Students of the Month. Pictured above are third grade honorees Emmanuel Aroh, Jamie Adams, Haley Lynch, Kinsie Ruckle, D'Ajah Smith and DeShauna Waters. Not pictured but honored were first graders Gracie Reister, Aaliyah Johnson, Ava Richardson, Aaliyah Sturgis and Leah Morris; second graders Frankie Richwalski, Luke Scott, Sunny Trivits and Zanyha Duffy; and fourth graders Brian Rodriguez-Perez, Alayiah Deshields, Jordyn Charvat and Marianni Chavez-Rodriguez